R is for RADIO CONTROLLED MENACE
The steady march of pedestrian
traffic on the busy avenue seemed to falter to a stop when the man raised his
hand and pointed at something emitting a loud buzzing in the blue. “Look! In
the sky! What is that, some kind of crazy foreign bird?”
Ida Mae James, on her way to her
job as head librarian and no one to suffer fools, tisk-tisked and corrected
him. “No, sir. That is an airplane. See the pill-like structure of the body? No
feathers. The wings are stationary. They do not flap to control movement.”
The man looked at Ida Mae as if her
admonition had produced an unpleasant odor. “You don’t say.”
“I do, and further more…”
The object descended, veering down
towards the crowded sidewalk.
As it approached, a young girl
exclaimed, “Why, it’s tiny! It must be a toy!”
“Must be some kind of a promotion
or something,” someone added.
A newcomer ran into the crowd
garbed in a scuba diver’s wetsuit, his face completely hidden behind a diving
mask. “Hardly a toy, young lady,” said the tinnily timbred voice of the stranger.
“It’s a drone, and it’s loaded with enough explosive power to decimate this
entire block. Everyone get away!”
Panic quickly trumped the novelty
of the situation, and the mass of onlookers scattered like spooked rabbits.
The Eel, Harbor City’s amphibious
avenger, raised his left arm into the air, fist clenched tight and bowed
slightly downward from his wrist. There was some sort of contraption bound to
his forearm with rubber straps—it looked like a miniature speargun. Through the
glass of his mask, The Eel watched the distant device, following it with his
hand as if it were an irritating fly he were intent on catching.
The small plane veered upwards and
circled back down, building up momentum as it approached its quarry, who kept
focusing up his raised forearm as one would aim through the scope of a rifle.
“Little closer,” he muttered,
seemingly to himself.
“There!” A concealed release in the
thumb of his glove was pressed and triggered a pneumatically projected spear,
which shot upward and into the body of the small radio-controlled plane. The
inertia of the spear pushed the toy-like terror a few feet into the air before
it had a chance to detonate into a brilliant cloud of orange fire, the heat of
which baked an artificial tan onto all who were caught in the wake of it. The
shockwave generated by the blast shattered storefront windows up and down the
block and tossed bystanders to the pavement like rag dolls.
“Jesus!” cried a man, pulling his stout, stubby form off the
ground. “Didja see that?” he asked everyone and no one in particular. “Say,
whatcher name, fella?”
“You must be from out of town,” Ida
Mae Brown interjected, smoothing the wrinkles in her dress. “That, sir, is The
Eel. He’s Harbor City’s sworn protector!”
“Yeah?” the man gasped in a voice
that could announce radio without a microphone and still reach the listening
audience. “Well where’d he go?”
The Eel had in fact used the
confusion of the hubbub to vamoose, hot in pursuit of the remaining drones
operated by the nefarious Radio Commander, Master of Remote Control Chaos!
“Eel, huh?” the man repeated.
“Guess it’s a fitting name how he slipped away and all.”
The tame joke produced an
unexpected chortle from Ida Mae Brown. And whether it was genuinely funny, or
just a reaction to the intensity of the previous moment, or just an example
proof to the theory that laughter is contagious, soon the entire street was in
an uproar.
The man from out of town simply
shook his head. “Sheez,” he mused, “this place is nutty. I think I best catch
the next boat back to Patterson.”
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